Review: Bicks MultiView Duo Camera Switcher

The Bick’s MultiView Duo is a small camera switcher using either PWM from radio receiver, or signal from an FC. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages compared to the good old Hobbyking video switcher.

It’s really tiny (10x17mm) and extremely light weight (0,9g)

Very easy to solder with the well-sized solder pads

It can be controlled by PWM signal from a radio receiver, or flight controller using PINIO feature in Betaflight

Supports wide input voltage (4.2V – 30V), works on 5V, as well as 2S to 6S directly LiPo input

Camera switching is very fast – almost feels like it’s faster than the Hobbyking one by a fraction of a second?

If you need 3 camera inputs, then the Hobbyking one is the way to go. However, I came up with a “hack” – you can hook up two Multiview DUO to achieve this, I will explain at the end of this review

It has servo header pins, if you don’t like soldering and prefer “plug and play”, it’s much easier

… the BATT pads on both sides of the board are interconnected, as well as the GND pads. This means the power to the camera switcher are shared with the cameras if you are powering them off the switcher.

You only need to connect power input on one side, connecting two different power sources might create a short if the voltages are different. Make sure you are using a voltage that your camera can take.

The camera switcher is always in PWM mode by default. But if a PWM signal is not detected within 5 seconds after powering up, the camera switcher will enter digital mode (PINIO).

For example, if UART 4 is free on my FC, I first need to free up the TX pin (A00 in this example);

resource SERIAL_TX 4 None

Then reassign that pin to a PinIO resource.

resource PINIO 1 A00
set pinio_box = 40,-1,-1,-1
save

Don’t worry at all about what these lines mean, just enter them and it will just work 🙂

You should now see a new slider in the Modes tab labelled “User1”. You can now assign an AUX channel on your radio (a switch) to control the MultiView Camera Switcher 🙂

This is my wiring for the setup. I am powering everything with 5V from the FC. PWM pad is connected to TX4 on the FC. Any spare UART would do.

It’s not officially recommended, just a hack I came up with recently. I haven’t actually tried it myself, but it should work 🙂 The cool thing is you can still control it through the flight controller.

I did check with Bick’s, and he replied: “Yeah that seems like it would work. The MultiViews have a very small amount of internal resistance, so i’d imagine it would take quite a few of them to create any noticeable drop in signal strength.”

First of all, you need two spare UART’s on the FC. Get their pin numbers in the CLI resources, In our example, the pin numbers are A00 and C06. Free them up.